This article is written like a personal reflection or essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (April 2012)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2012)

Separation of presentation and content (or "separate content from presentation", a special case of the form and content principle) is a common idiom, a design philosophy, and a methodology applied in the context of various publishing technology disciplines, including information retrieval, template processing, web design, web development, word processing, desktop publishing, and model-driven development. It is a specific instance of the more general philosophy, separation of concerns.

History[link]

The first person known to have expressed need for such a separation was William W. Tunnicliffe.^{[citation needed]}

Intended meaning[link]

When invoked as an idiom, the underlying concept is to make a distinction between the actual meaning of a document, and how this meaning is presented to its readers. A common example is the em element in HTML, to denote emphasis. While emphasis is part of the content of the document, its presentation may be in an oblique font style, but one need not necessarily imply the other: for example, emphasis in text that is already oblique should in fact be printed in some other font style or weight (e.g., normal again or in boldface) that is distinct from that of the text it appears in; conversely, oblique text need not imply emphasis—it could be used to style a preface, for example. Moreover, notice that the foregoing sentence assumes that the output mode is visual; but if the mode were audio, the indication of the intended meaning (emphasis) could be achieved by formatting the em words with a louder or higher-pitched voice by the text-to-speech synthesizer. Separation of content and presentation means that markup is always used for document structure, never for presentation (which is properly the job of tools such as XSLT, XSL, and CSS).^[1]

An extreme example of separation of presentation and content—a list presented as a tag cloud.

Machine readability[link]

The general aim of separation of presentation and content is machine readability, that is, making it possible for machines to detect meaning or intent. (The machine readability is then a means to desired ends, as discussed below.) For example, a human being reading a document has little trouble to grab from context that an oblique rendering in one place would be emphasized text, but in another place is a title of a book. However, as robots and crawlers have more difficulty with this task, separation of presentation and content generally aids in their distinguishing of such things which are presented in the same way, but have a different meaning—or have the same meaning, but are presented in a different way.

Machine readability allows affordably serving the information to a wider variety of users (in a presentation that they can understand), where users may be humans or machines. This requires the ability to recast abstractions in new instances quickly and cheaply (that is, without time-consuming reworking), which generally requires automation rather than person-hours of labor. For example:

• The ability to deliver the same information in different media, and to change the medium quickly and cheaply; and within one medium, to change instances easily
  • To serve the same message to different users:
    • as printed display (for technophobes or for users with contextual desire for print)
      • as printed display with the typesetting recast into various graphic designs without time being spent on any manual reworking of the content (a good example is given at CSS Zen Garden)^[2]
    • as online visual display (for most users in most instances)
      • as online visual display in various graphic designs
    • as online audio (for blind users or for sighted users with contextual desire for audio)
    • as braille (for blind users)
    • as input to an API (for users that are machines)
      • The other machines can then take the information and do further transformations or actions. These may be ones that people cannot do (or cannot do quickly and cheaply), but machines can do (and can do [more] quickly and [more] cheaply). For example:
        • Take a book and translate it into another natural language
        • Take audio of speech and translate it into another natural language
        • Take audio of speech and transcribe it for reading (for deaf users or for hearing users who want transcription of voicemail into e-mail or IM)
        • Take the data contained in an entire library and search through it for ABC-XYZ, then turn every instance of ABC blue, and serve every instance of XYZ to a machine that will categorize it

Common terms[link]

There are a number of common terms used to describe these two separate dimensions of communication, which include:

Semantic 

logic, information, ontology, semantics, data, outline, model, message, content

Aesthetic (or parsing-related)

graphics, design, layout, style, visualization, view, medium, presentation

Possibility and degrees of separation[link]

In communication design, the message is the content and the medium is the tools to deliver that message. In the book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan stated that "The medium is the message", which has since been the subject of much debate. One interpretation is that the choice of medium (presentation tools) affects the (presentation content) message. It is possible for the choice of content and choice of medium to affect the quality of the presentation, meaning how well a message may be received. The degree that content may be separated from presentation depends on how much the quality of the medium affects the quality of the message. In many cases, the possibility and degrees of separation are as subjective as the content itself.

See also[link]

• Internationalization^[3]
• Model-view-controller (MVC)
• Separation of concerns
• Style sheet (desktop publishing)
• Style sheet (web development)
• Template (disambiguation)
• Template systems
• What You See Is What You Mean

References[link]

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (August 2008)

Hector Avalos (born in Nogales, Sonora, México, October 8, 1958) is a professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University and the author of several books about religion.^[1] He is a former Pentecostal preacher and child evangelist.^[2]

He has a Doctor of Philosophy in Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Studies from Harvard University (1991), a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School (1985), and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1982.

Avalos arrived at Iowa State University in the Fall of 1993 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship (1991–93) in the departments of Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1996 Avalos was named Professor of the Year at Iowa State University, where he was also named a Master Teacher for 2003–04. Other awards include The Early Achievement in Research and Creative Activity Award (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 1996), and the Outstanding Professor Award (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 1996)[1].

Avalos is an internationally recognized opponent of neo-creationism and the intelligent design movement, and is frequently linked to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist and proponent of intelligent design who was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. Avalos co-authored a statement against intelligent design in 2005, which was eventually signed by over 130 faculty members at Iowa State University. That faculty statement became a model for other statements at the University of Northern Iowa and at the University of Iowa.^{[citation needed]} Gonzalez and Avalos are both featured in the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008).

Avalos is an atheist activist and advocate of secular humanist ethics.

Research and publication[link]

Avalos' first major work was Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel (1995), published in the Harvard Semitic Monograph series. The book was the first to combine systematically critical biblical studies with medical anthropology to reconstruct the health care systems of Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel.^[3] In Health Care and the Rise of Christianity (1999) Avalos outlined the thesis that Christianity began, in part, as a health care reform movement that sought to address the problems voiced by patients in the Greco-Roman world.^[4]

Since 2004, Avalos had turned his attention to the study of U.S. Latinos, the name given to people who live in the United States and trace their ancestry to the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America. Latinos are now the largest "minority" in the United States, numbering over 40 million persons. By then, Avalos also served as General Editor of Religion in the Americas book series for Brill Publishers. He was the editor of, and a contributor to, Introduction to the U.S. Latina and Latino Religious Experience (2004), which aimed to be the first general textbook on U.S. Latino/a religions. It was unusual because it covered groups such as Dominicans and Central Americans, which most other books on Latino religion usually overlook.^{[citation needed]}

His book Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (2005) used scarce resource theory to explain the role of religion in violence. Avalos argues that all conflict is usually the result of some resource that is either scarce or perceived to be scarce. This could range from love in a family to energy on a global scale. When religion causes violence, it does so because it has created a new scarce resource somewhere. Such scarce resources could include sacred space ("The Holy Land"), group privileging, and eternal life. Violence may result from the effort to maintain or acquire these religiously-created resources, and people may be willing to give or take life in pursuit of these resources. However, unlike scarcities that are verifiable (e.g., water, oil), resources such as eternal life are unverifiable and created entirely by religious bellief. Therefore, when one kills for religious reasons, one is usually trading actual lives for resources that are either not scarce or cannot even be verified to exist. He made the further argument that religious violence is always immoral, whereas secular violence is only sometimes immoral. The book also offered a scathing critique of religionist scholars who defended biblical violence and genocide, as well as a critique of the thesis that the Nazi Holocaust was an example of atheistic violence. Avalos and his book were featured on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation on August 22, 2005. It established his position as a critic of religion alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

The same year, Avalos published Strangers in Our Own Land: Religion in U.S. Latina/o Literature (2005), which was the first systematic study of how Latino authors address issues of religion and specific religions (e.g., Judaism, Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, African Religions, and Indigenous religions).

In 2007 Avalos published The End of Biblical Studies (2007) where he argued that academic biblical scholarship was primarily an apologetic religionist enterprise meant to provide the illusion that the Bible was still a culturally and morally superior authority. He critiqued numerous fields (translation, archaeology, history, textual criticism, literary aesthetics) arguing the discipline was permeated with pro-religionist biases. John Merrill of the Biblical Archaeology Review writes that "instead of being constructive, Avalos’s arguments come off in the end as an exercise in emotional nihilism whose conclusions seem ultimately self-defeating."^[5]

This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, published also in 2007, saw Avalos returning to health care studies. He contributed to, and co-edited (with Sarah Melcher and Jeremy Schipper), an anthology that explores how biblical authors conceptualize the human body and deviations from "normative" views of the human body.^[6]

In 2011, Avalos published Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield Phoenix Press), which seeks to deconstruct the claim that reliance on biblical and Christian ethics was a main factor in the abolition of slavery in western civilizations.^[7]

In addition to books, Avalos has published dozens of articles in peer reviewed and semi-scholarly periodicals (e.g., Journal of Biblical Literature, Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and Traditio), as well as in standard reference books such as The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (1996), Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000), and The New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (2006–).The subjects have ranged from Astronomy and the Bible to targumic textual criticism.

Books[link]

• Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield,UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011) ISBN 978-1-907534-28-7
• This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (co-edited with Sarah Melcher and Jeremy Schipper) (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) ISBN 1-58983-186-1.
• The End of Biblical Studies (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007) ISBN 1-59102-536-2.
• Strangers in Our Own Land: Religion in U.S. Latina/o Literature, (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005) ISBN 0-687-33045-9.
• Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005) ISBN 1-59102-284-3
• Introduction to the U.S. Latina and Latino Religious Experience, (Editor; Boston: Brill, 2004) ISBN 0-391-04240-8.
• Se puede saber si Dios existe? [Can One Know if God Exists?]. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 2003) ISBN 1-59102-043-3.
• Health Care and the Rise of Christianity, (Peabody: Mass: Hendrickson Press, 1999) ISBN 1-56563-337-7.
• Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel (Harvard Semitic Monographs 54: Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995) ISBN 0-7885-0098-8.
• A chapter called, "Why Biblical studies must end" p107 in The End of Christianity edited by John W. Loftus, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011) ISBN 1-61614-413-5.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Hector Avalos Faculty Webpage
• Works by or about Hector Avalos in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Hector Avalos debates William Lane Craig — Resurrection of Jesus: Fact or Fiction?

Matt Dillahunty
Matt Dillahunty on The Atheist Experience TV show, 25th July 2006.
Born	(1969-03-31) March 31, 1969 (age 43)
Nationality	USA
Known for	Atheism activism

Matt Dillahunty is the president of the Atheist Community of Austin, the host of the live internet radio show "Non-Prophets Radio" and of the Austin Public-access television cable TV show The Atheist Experience.^[1] He is also the founder and contributor of the counter-apologetics encyclopedia Iron Chariots and its subsidiary sites.^[2]

Biography[link]

Matt was raised as a Baptist Christian and sought to become a Baptist minister.^[3] His religious studies, instead of bolstering his faith as he intended, led to a rejection of Christianity and, eventually, all religions.^[4]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Matt Dillahunty on Twitter
• The Non-Prophets homepage
• The Atheist Experience homepage
• Saving believers: Former Christian finds calling to preach the good news of atheism
• PBS: Public-Access TV Fights for Relevance in the YouTube Age
• The Atheist Experience live stream

This United States biographical article related to radio is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

John Guare
Guare at the 2009 premiere of PoliWood
Born	(1938-02-05) February 5, 1938 (age 74) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Playwright
Nationality	American
Period	1964–present
Notable work(s)	The House of Blue Leaves; Six Degrees of Separation

John Guare (pronounced gwâr; born February 5, 1938) is an American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body. His style, which mixes comic invention with an acute sense of the failure of human relations and aspirations, is at once cruel and deeply compassionate.

In the foreword to a collection of Guare's plays, film director Louis Malle writes:

Guare practices a humor that is synonymous with lucidity, exploding genre and clichés, taking us to the core of human suffering: the awareness of corruption in our own bodies, death circling in. We try to fight it all by creating various mythologies, and it is Guare's peculiar aptitude for exposing these grandiose lies of ours that makes his work so magical.^{[citation needed]}

Early life[link]

Guare was born in New York City and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. He was raised a Roman Catholic, but is apparently now a lapsed Catholic.^[1] He was educated at Georgetown University, (BA, 1960), where in 1958 he contributed a song to an original musical revue entitled The Natives Are Restless and presented by the Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society. The song humorously attributed the success of many famous people to the syllable “O” in their names. Under the direction of Donn B. Murphy, his play The Toadstool Boy, about a country singer's quest for fame, won first place in the District of Columbia Recreation Department's One-Act-Play competition.

In 1960, the Mask and Bauble presented The Thirties Girl, a musical for which Guare did the book, much of the music and the lyrics, again under Murphy's tutelage. Set in Hollywood's turbulent 1920's, it dealt with the dethronement of a reigning diva by a fresh-faced starlet. (Management of identity and celebrity, and the quest for fame, the focus of these early efforts, are recurring themes in the body of Guare's work. He subsequently imported the Hollywod ingenue's song, I'm Here With Bells On into his first full-length Off-Broadway play, The House of Blue Leaves, which received an Obie Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and subsequently won Guare a Tony Award in its 1986 Broadway revival.)

Guare and Swoosie Kurtz at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

Guare went on to the Yale School of Drama, (MFA, 1963).

Career[link]

Guare's early plays, mostly comic one-acts exhibiting a flair for the absurd, include To Wally Pantoni, We Leave a Credenza (1964), Muzeeka (1968), and Cop-Out (1968). The House of Blue Leaves (1971), a domestic drama by turns wildly comic and despairingly desperate, moved Guare into the front ranks of American dramatists. Chaucer in Rome, a sequel to The House of Blue Leaves, received its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in July 1999 and later enjoyed a production in New York by Lincoln Center Theater.

Later plays include Marco Polo Sings a Solo, Bosoms and Neglect, Moon Over Miami, Six Degrees of Separation, and Four Baboons Adoring the Sun. Lake Hollywood and A Few Stout Individuals (2002) both received their world premieres at Signature Theatre. Six Degrees of Separation (1990), an intricately plotted comedy of manners about an African-American confidence man who poses as the son of film star Sidney Poitier, has been the most highly praised and widely produced of Guare's full-length plays. It was made into a film in 1993.

Guare’s cycle of plays on nineteenth-century America, Gardenia, Lydie Breeze and Women and Water, has been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington D.C., London and Australia. A Few Stout Individuals returns to nineteenth century America, with a cast that includes Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, soprano Adelina Patti and the Emperor and Empress of Japan. These historic dramas investigate the violence at the root of American identity and the failure of utopian aspirations.

Guare has also been involved with musical theatre. His libretto with Mel Shapiro for the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona was a success when it premiered in 1971 and was revived in 2005 at the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park. It won the two men the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical. He wrote the songs for Landscape of the Body. Guare wrote narration for '"Psyche,"' a tone poem by César Franck, which premiered at Avery Fisher Hall in October 1997, conducted by Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic. In 1999, he revised the book of the Cole Porter musical comedy, Kiss Me, Kate for its Broadway revival. He also wrote the book for the Broadway musical Sweet Smell of Success (musical).

Guare wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's film Atlantic City (1980), for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

He was a founding member in 1965 of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut and Resident Playwright at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. He is a council member of the Dramatists Guild, co-editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, co-produces the New Plays Reading Room Series at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts and teaches in the Playwriting department at the Yale School of Drama.

Works[link]

All dramas for the stage unless otherwise noted.

• (1971) The House of Blue Leaves
• (1971) Two Gentlemen of Verona
• (1974) Rich and Famous
• (1977) Landscape of the Body
• (1977) Marco Polo Sings a Solo
• (1979) Bosoms and Neglect
• (1980) Atlantic City (screenplay)
• (1982) Lydie Breeze
• (1982) Gardenia
• (1986) The Race to Urga
• (1990) Six Degrees of Separation
• (1990) Women and Water
• (1992) Four Baboons Adoring the Sun
• (1999) Lake Hollywood
• (2001) Chaucer in Rome
• (2002) A Few Stout Individuals
• (2010) A Free Man of Color

Awards and honors[link]

• Muzeeka won an Obie in 1968.
• The House of Blue Leaves won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play in 1971 and four Tony Awards for its 1986 revival at Lincoln Center Theater.
• Two Gentlemen of Verona won both the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical in 1972. Guare also received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics.
• Six Degrees of Separation won an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and London’s Olivier Award for Best Play; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
• Mr. Guare received the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his plays The House of Blue Leaves, Rich and Famous, Marco Polo Sings a Solo, Landscape of the Body and Bosoms and Neglect.
• In 1989, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters elected him a member.
• In 1993 he was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame.
• In 1996 he received the New York State Governor’s Arts Award.
• Signature Theatre honored him with a season 1998 - 1999.
• In 1999 he was honored at the William Inge Festival.
• In 2003 he won The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama.

References[link]

1. ^ [1]

External links[link]

• Anne Cattaneo (Winter 1992). "John Guare, The Art of Theater No. 9". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1993/the-art-of-theater-no-9-john-guare. 
• John Guare at the Internet Movie Database
• Biography at theatredatabase.com
• John Guare with poster for his Caffe Cino production
• John Guare Papers at Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.